​General Guidelines and Principles

The goal of the College is to provide adequate computer facilities for support of teaching and learning needs of all faculty, students and staff, and to update these facilities as needed to keep the College competitive in the workplace.

Access to the Western Network is not in itself a right, but a privilege. Western reserves the right to deny access to Western resources with personally owned equipment. Equipment purchased from the Western Resale program is not considered to be college equipment. Inappropriate use or access to Western resources using internally or externally owned equipment by employees, students, or visitors of/to the college may result in removal of equipment, withdrawal of access privileges, discipline, and/or prosecution.

In compliance with Western
Policy B0408, only Western employees, students and customers will be allowed to use Western computer equipment. "Customer" is defined as someone who is registered for a class in the current semester or is working under contract with Western. The person using Western equipment must hold on their person a valid Western ID or receipt of payment on current course. Western employees may ask for proper identification at any time from persons using or connected to Western owned equipment. Anyone found using Western resources without proper authorization will be asked to leave and may be subject to prosecution.

It is the policy of the College to abide by all applicable laws governing computer software use, privacy, copyrights, and recognition of intellectual property (INMS manages software licensing for the District).

Western reserves the right to track, limit the use and remove the use of Peer-to-Peer applications for sharing files and bandwidth exploitation. Applications like these can infringe on copyrighted material and they can be used to gain unauthorized access to Western network services.

Western reserves the right to remove non-authorized applications and/or non-licensed applications by Western from College owned equipment.

The use of another individual's computer account without his/her expressed consent will be viewed as the stealing of Western resources and as computer fraud subject to discipline and/or prosecution.

No person shall use a computer system or computer network anonymously or use pseudonyms to attempt to escape from prosecution of laws or regulations, or otherwise to escape responsibility for their actions.

Inappropriate use of the Internet and other networks to which Western is directly or indirectly connected will be deemed abuse of computer privileges and may result in loss of privileges or further discipline in accordance with College policies. Examples of inappropriate use of the networks include, but are not limited to, the following:

Participation in network activities that place a strain on computer / network resources causing a denial of service overload.

Viewing offensive images not necessitated by an assignment (students) or job responsibilities.

The sending of offensive and/or harassing messages to other individuals on the network or Internet.

Unauthorized access or attempted access to Western computers or of another network computer system from Western resources.

The College is an Internet end user and not an Internet service provider.

Charging any long distance telephone call or message to any telephone, misusing telephone account numbers, or altering any telephone equipment or other communication devices by whatever means on College premises is prohibited.

INMS staff reserves the right to monitor computer system and computer network use and to keep and audit detailed records of computer sessions as well as the contents of computer system and computer network storage. Records and traces may be recorded routinely for trouble shooting, performance monitoring, security purposes, auditing, recovery from system failure, or in response to a complaint to protect the College's and others' equipment and software from unauthorized use or tampering.

When diagnosing technical problems, it is INMS practice to avoid perusing personal communications and passwords.

All users are responsible for backing up their data to their own storage media.

Theft or malicious damage to any Western equipment will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Please report any theft or damage to INMS and security as soon as possible.

International, federal, state and local law apply to computer system and computer network use. Particular attention is called to federal export regulations when using computer networks. For example, all users are subject to all applicable copyright laws.

To maintain standards and security of our data, video, and telephone networks, all college owned equipment to be connected to our data, video, and telephone networks must be purchased or pre-authorized through the INMS department.

Failure to comply with the above guidelines or the unauthorized or illegitimate use of Western Technical College computing facilities or resources shall constitute a violation of College policy and will subject the violator to disciplinary or legal action by the College. In addition, the College may require restitution for any use of service that is in violation of these guidelines. Any questions about this policy or the applicability of this policy to a particular situation should be referred to the Director of INMS.